To quote: I promised you all an update on Cross-Game chat, so here it is. And you're not going to like it.

As I told you before, Cross-game voice chat has been in the works for a while now. I mentioned last time that it was on target for 3.0 providing that we didn't hit any snags. Well guess what, we hit a snag! An all too familiar snag.

Time for a history lesson. How many of you remember what it was like before FW 2.4? That's right - no in-game XMB. No custom soundtracks. In-game XMB was the most heavily requested feature at the time and we worked tirelessly in order to get it in (By "we", I mean Sony Japan - as I said before, FW isn't my department).

It very nearly didn't happen, you have no idea how difficult it is to backport a feature like that onto a system (the game) that doesn't even know its there, but somehow we managed it. Well, for most titles. There are still the odd few titles out there that don't support in-game XMB ("black" titles).

Custom soundtracks was another one we had working in nearly every title. Obviously it was never going to work in black titles, but about 95% of the titles that worked...

298w ago - Released last week for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, Prototype sports impressive visuals for a sandbox open-world game.

In order to make the most out of each on its released platform there are some differences, as detailed below.

To quote: Unlike the PS3's similar super-hero open-world game InFamous, Prototype is not natively rendered in high-definition on either console.

Prototype is rendered at 1120 by 640 pixels, with QAA (quinux anti-aliasing) on the PS3 and 2xMSAA (multisample anti-aliasing) on the Xbox 360.

The differences between these two solutions for video game "jaggies" are not terribly distinct, apart from a slight blur to the image with QAA; if sufficiently integrated into the game's art style this won't severely impact visual quality (such as is seen in Killzone 2.)

Of course, resolution and aliasing are not really an issue in the PC version of the game, which depending on your set-up can render up to 2560 by 1600 pixels with 4xMSAA.

You will find that the PS3 game's framerate can suffer from significant screen tearing when there's lots of action going on (which is a common occurrence in Prototype).

The Xbox 360 game is locked at 30 frames-per-second, and generally runs steadily with minimal screen tearing. Screen tearing...

331w ago - Even though Twilight Princess was in development for years, in some ways, fans were disappointed. The game, while not even close to being a bad game, simply fell short of some expectations.

In a way, Shigeru Miyamoto feels the same way in that he feels as though "there was something missing" from the experience.

To quote: "That's something that I talk to the members of my development team about on a regular basis. What I've been saying to our development teams recently is that "Twilight Princess" was not a bad game, by any means. But, still, it felt like there was something missing.

And while, personally, I feel like "Super Mario Galaxy" was able to do some things that were very new and were very unique, at the same time, from another perspective, certain elements of it do feel somewhat conservative in terms of how far we branched out with design.

And so this is something I've been talking to both of those teams about. Of course, as is customary with Nintendo, it's very rare that we are able to announce any games until they're ready for release, but I can say that these are themes that both of those teams are taking into account and the hope is that for both of those franchises, when we do release the next installments of the "Zelda" [franchise]...

362w ago - To quote west79: Hi, I would like to inform everybody that the European PSN Store version of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue has some serious issues about the terms of service user agreement.

First of all, for playing you need to have your PSN Account connected to the network like Warhawk, yes, it means you can't play it offline.

In other news the game can't be shared between different accounts. It's linked only to the PSN user that bought the game itself, while the license doesn't inform the user about this before buying, unlike Warhawk as you can see in this picture I took.